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Movies on HBO: TRAP

by Jef Dinsmore
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We’ve already mentioned that M Night Shyamalan is on a roll with movies that ultimately end up on HBO and Max. To add to the list is the 2024 psychological thriller TRAP, which he wrote, directed, and produced.

The plot is simple enough. Philadelphia firefighter Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his teenage daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue, to pop star Lady Raven’s concert (Raven is played by nepo-baby Saleka Night Shyamalan) as a reward for her good grades. There, Cooper notices the unusually high police presence around the Movies_Trap-Pic03-300x167concert venue. He learns from a vendor named Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) that the FBI plans to catch a serial killer known as “the Butcher”, having learned he will be in attendance. The manhunt is led by an FBI profiler named Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills). Cooper is revealed to be the Butcher himself, secretly checking footage on his phone of his latest captive victim. He steals Jamie’s ID card and learns the passphrase that will identify him as an employee. Can he escape the trap he is in, enclosed in a confined concert venue? 

He does escape by cleverly rigging it up for his daughter to be a guest of the artist Lady Raven. He manages his exit by leaving with her entourage and just as cleverly obtaining her as a bargaining chip. Can he truly dodge the manhunt and his crime in the 105 minutes the movie gives him? Do we want him to? How does Riley take to the shocking news of his certain capture? Or did she possibly turn him in?

Actually, the filming of TRAP seems more interesting than the premise. Wikipedia generated this paragraph, from multiple sources, regarding the process –

Songs in the film were performed on stage as if it were a real concert. Cora Kozaris was the choreographer, and a videographer recorded onstage material and projected it onto the stadium’s screens in real-time. The shoot involved thousands of extras, who were not told what the film was about but received Saleka’s music beforehand to be able to sing along. Hartnett recalled multiple extras consoling him because they thought he was nervous and were unaware of the character he was playing.  The order of filming consisted of audience reactions, with music playing, followed by Saleka dancing and miming on stage, and then, after the extras went quiet, actors with dialogue, with a beat track in the background to help actors maintain rhythm. Hartnett and Donoghue screamed parts of their dialogue to match the intended noise levels of a concert.  For conversational scenes in which actors would look into the camera lens, Shyamalan attached a one-way mirror to the lens that would reflect off another mirror and allow the actor in close-up to see the other actor.

So, does it all work? RT generated the following score –

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Find TRAP now playing on HBO and streaming on Max.

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